Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday this season Athleticism will tackle three of the biggest questions that will arise in football this weekend.
It was the match week when Arsenal beat Bournemouth and had a tantalizing few hours of hope in the title race, before Manchester City steamrolled Wolverhampton Wanderers, Jurgen Klopp’s penultimate home game in Liverpool’s tenure ended with a pretty crazy 4-2 win over Tottenham Hotspur, and Nottingham Forest took a big step towards safety by beating Sheffield United 3-1.
Here, we’ll ask whether Chelsea’s good form actually means anything, what impact Tottenham’s sluggish end to the season will have on their future and whether America’s big sports stars might think twice before investing in English football after a difficult weekend for Tom Brady and JJ Watt. …
Chelsea are one of the Premier League’s in-form teams – but what does that mean?
Would you like to guess the identity of the in-form Premier League team, other than the top three, in the last 12 games? The team that has won the most home games, as well as the first two, since mid-December? The team that has scored the most goals at home in 2024?
Well, the clue is in the subtitle of this section. Improbably, Chelsea are finishing the season quite well, especially after their 5-0 defeat to West Ham United.
PL among the top six in the last three months
Position | Team | Plays | DG | Points |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 |
13 |
35 |
34 |
|
2 |
13 |
25 |
33 |
|
3 |
13 |
13 |
27 |
|
4 |
12 |
12 |
23 |
|
5 |
12 |
11 |
23 |
|
6 |
13 |
1 |
21 |
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: this season has been a disaster at Stamford Bridge, with a poorly thought-out transfer policy ensuring Mauricio Pochettino’s side will never challenge for Champions League places, let alone come close of the title race. . They have mostly seemed subdued at best, actively bad in many cases.
And yet, they could finish in the European qualifying places. Sixth place is a real possibility, especially since at least one of the other two main contenders for that position, Newcastle United and Manchester United, will drop points when they face each other in their penultimate match of the season.
There is some hope for the future. You don’t need to be reminded of how good Cole Palmer has been, but Mykhailo Mudryk and Moises Caicedo have shown signs of life in recent weeks – at one point they looked like £200m flushed down the toilet .
Nicolas Jackson now has 16 goals in all competitions: Didier Drogba has only scored more in two of his nine seasons at Chelsea. It’s a slightly misleading comparison as Drogba’s legend is built on when and against whom he scored his goals, rather than the volume of them, but it at least illustrates that, despite the criticism, Jackson was not the disaster you might think.
How would Chelsea’s season be viewed if they took this sixth place? A success? Probably not. A failure? That would seem harsh. Would it even be a good thing if they entered Europe? Could the current hierarchy decide that this means they are doing everything right? Does this mean anything?
If nothing else, it shows that the narrative of a team’s season can be more important than their actual finishing position.
Deciphering Cole Palmer’s astonishing season at Chelsea
Will Spurs’ desperate run have bigger consequences?
You would have to be quite obtuse and/or extremely negative to say that Ange Postecoglou’s first season at the helm of Tottenham was a failure.
But it is becoming increasingly difficult to argue for absolute, unambiguous success. That makes four consecutive league defeats following the 4-2 loss to Liverpool, their worst run since 2004. As Sky Sports’ Adam Bate on X pointed out, if they don’t beat Burnley next weekend, Postecoglou will win an almost identical victory. percentage in Nuno Espirito Santo – Postecoglou has won 50 percent of his 38 matches in charge, Nuno has won 47 percent of his 17 matches in 2021.
It has been argued that if Tottenham’s season had been reversed – that is, if their good run had come at the end of the season rather than the start – things would have looked much rosier heading into of summer. That’s true enough, but if their season had been reversed, just like Nuno, Postecoglou might not have made it past November.
The important caveat to any conclusions based on this series is that these four games were pretty tough. Newcastle and Chelsea are having their best moments of the season, and Arsenal and Liverpool are two of the three best teams in the division.
It is not the results themselves that are of concern, but their nature. If Spurs had lost playing the dynamic, free, sometimes irresponsible and entertaining football that Postecoglou preaches and sometimes delivered, that would be one thing – but they have been mostly flat and uninspired, scoring goals against Liverpool and Arsenal when it was too late.
Their last victory – and their last convincing performance – against a team that did not fall from relegation was at the start of March, when they beat Aston Villa. They’ve been in a funk for almost two months, which isn’t ideal.
The question is whether this crisis will harm Postecoglou’s work this summer and next season. The last manager of a north London club to ask everyone to trust the process turned out to be right, but Mikel Arteta won the FA Cup in his first season at Arsenal, showing tangible evidence that It’s worth sticking with it.
The end of Spurs’ campaign could simply be a symptom of growing pains, fatigue appearing at the end of a season where they have suffered significant injury problems and the manager is working with a team that is not still quite to his taste.
Yet in recent weeks, they seemed truly desperate. The concern has to be that this will damage the trust – of the players, of the fans, of everyone around Spurs – in Postecoglou to get it right later.
Will the failure of Tom Brady and JJ Watt’s teams make other American stars think twice?
It hasn’t been a great weekend for famous Americans who have invested in English football.
On Saturday, Birmingham’s relegation from the Championship was confirmed, capping a calamitous season in which six managers took charge of a game, their demotion confirmed despite a “too little, too late” victory over Norwich. The highlight of their day was this fan scoring an absolute scream after the match.
Relegated, but our sense of humor remains 😂 #bcfc pic.twitter.com/TFucdiSbTw
– Mr. Greedy (@RockyKL) May 4, 2024
It’s made even worse by the fact that they were in the play-offs in October and survived against all odds last season. This was not enough to keep John Eustace in his post, replaced on the basis of “misalignment with the management of the club” by Knighthead, the American group which counts Tom Brady among its investors.
It seems like a long time ago now that Brady was charming the locals at the Roost, a pub near Birmingham Stadium. “I like being the underdog,” Brady, a seven-time Super Bowl winner and three-time NFL MVP, said at the time. “Maybe you’re asking: ‘How much do you know about English football, Tom?’ Well, let’s just say I have a lot to learn. But I know some things about winning, and that can translate very well.
We’ll call this a work in progress.
Elsewhere, JJ and Kealia Watt’s first season as part of the ownership group at Burnley is certainly not going to end well. Burnley’s 4-1 defeat to Newcastle means they are unlikely to survive, and their relegation could be confirmed this week if Nottingham Forest’s appeal against their points deduction is successful. Sent by a committee somewhere would be a deeply unsatisfying way to end a season, but it’s worth pointing out that Burnley would already be gone if Forest hadn’t breached the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability (PSR) rules.
No one directly blames Brady or the Watts (although in Brady’s case he was vaguely part of a group that made some truly catastrophic decisions) for these failures, but is there a broader lesson to be learned ?
If that’s the case, perhaps it’s because making it in English football isn’t as easy as it might seem when watching Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s documentary series Welcome To Wrexham. Watt and Brady are famous faces, PR for those who actually make the decisions, and maybe in the long run their influence will be positive – but for now, if there’s anyone else of similar stature looking to get involved in this often perilous and unpredictable world of English football, they might think twice.
Coming this week
- Drinking up these final rounds of Premier League matches while they’re still here: The final match of this round of matches takes place on Monday, as Manchester United travel to Croydon to take on Crystal Palace.
- It is then time for football to put on its big boy pants: the second leg of the Champions League semi-final between Paris Saint-Germain and Borussia Dortmund takes place on Tuesday at the Parc des Princes, with the Germans holding a thin 1-0. advantage over Luis Enrique’s boys.
- And Wednesday, the other: We’re legally obligated to call Real Madrid vs. Bayern Munich “well balanced,” which is pretty accurate considering it’s 2-2 heading into the second half of the game at the Bernabeu.
- Wednesday will also see a rogue Europa Conference League semi-final in the form of the second leg between Club Brugge and Fiorentina, with the Italians holding a 3-2 advantage from the first match.
- This match will not take place on Thursday to avoid a clash with the so-called Procession of the Holy Blood in the Belgian capital, but the winners will face either Aston Villa or Olympiacos, with Unai Emery’s gang having to fill the 4-2 deficit from the last game. week.
- Next up, we have the Europa League semi-finals: Bayer Leverkusen will be aiming to make it a truly crazy 49 games unbeaten this season when they take a 2-0 lead over Roma in the second leg at home. Between Atalanta and Marseille, everything is tied after the first leg.
- You also have plenty of other semi-finals spread throughout the week via the English Football League play-offs, which are always close encounters. Appreciate.
(Top photos: Getty Images)